Weekly Inspirations: June 2nd, 2017

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week:

8 Ways to Fail Your Way to Success

At some point, though, we come to accept that screwing up is a key part of the creative process. Think about how kids play: They don’t think, they just do. And if the whole contraption comes crashing to the floor, they laugh at the mess and start over. (Or throw a fit, but hey, they’re learning about emotion, too!) Point is, when you embrace setbacks and don’t let them cripple you, you’re more likely to get across the finish line. Maybe we should stop talking about failure and call our botched projects “experiments.” And let’s take a cue from Edison and crowd as many experiments into 24 hours as we can. Here are eight ways to fail your way forward.Read the article

Notifications: A Tragedy Of the Digital Commons

The smartphone was born alongside the era of apps. Functionality was app-specific and took place within an isolated interface. There was no GPS in the early days. There was no real-time video (broadband didn’t support it), and communication was asynchronous and still largely done via SMS, email, or old fashioned phone calls. Of course, today’s mobile devices are entirely different — they know where we are, they connect us in real-time, and the applications have evolved accordingly. The apps have advanced beyond their mobile operating systems. To accomodate, iOS and Android have tried to surface the always-on, hyper intelligent activity within applications in very unintelligent ways. We got badges on icons, auto-updating, and ultimately notifications.Read the article

Nike just opened a running track where you can race against your digital self

Every runner wants to beat their best time. So, who better to race against than yourself? Nike answers that question with its recently unveiled Nike Unlimited Stadiuminstallation in Manila, Philippines, where runners race against a digital avatar of themselves that runs as fast as the regular human runner. To race against your digital self, you place a radio frequency identification sensor on your sneaker and then run a lap on the track. After the initial lap time records, a digital avatar appears on several large LED screens placed around the track. Fortunately, the avatar doesn’t speak to you, so don’t worry about being berated by a digital copy of yourself for not keeping up. Only 30 runners are allowed on the track at any given time. The 200-meter installation was built by global advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s (BBH) Singapore division and takes over an entire city block in Manila. The track was purposely designed to look like the sole of Nike’s new LunarEpic running shoe and illuminates a multitude of colors while featuring the same circular drawings found at the bottom of the shoe. As of now, there’s no information regarding how long the installation plans to remain open or if Nike expects to bring it to more locations around the globe.Read the article

Google’s CEO doesn’t use bullet points and neither should you

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced at the company’s 2017 developers conference that Google is “rethinking all our products” as it moves from a mobile-first world to an “A.I.-first” one. His presentation also reflected a rethinking of traditional presentation style. Senior managers and executives at Google have told me that visual storytelling plays an important role in getting their messages across. In fact, Google’s employees are being trained to present in a bolder, fresher style–less text heavy and more visual.Read the article

We Studied Brands Around The World. What Consumers Want Isn’t What You Think

Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one. Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute. It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done.Read the article

A GUIDE TO BRAND GUIDES

Alot of work goes into crafting the perfect brand. Okay, that’s the understatement of the year. But it’s the reason designing within a brand has so many rules. To make sure that new design work melds the existing brand, companies will go to extremelengths to define the styles and specifications to guide the creative process. 1200-page handbooks, exact Pantone match colors— at a certain scale, defining how to use the brand is as much a job as making the brand itself.Read the article

What’s The Link Between Creativity and Depression?

The relationship between depression and creativity is often romanticized as the key to creating good art. It’s been called the dark side of creativity, or the key to genius. There’s hundreds of think pieces online about how depression can supercharge your creative endeavors, but do those think pieces actually hold any weight? The short answer is yes but it’s complicated. It’s one of the world’s most common mental disorders and creative types are proven to be the group most affected by this disorder. Psych2Go’s new video breaks down the relationship between creativity and depression. By citing many different studies on depression, the video highlights the nature of the very complicated relationship. Many studies suggest that creative people are more exposed to the causal effects of depression while others suggest that depression causes creativity. It’s hard to find a streamlined relationship between creativity and depression. The truth is that the two things are so inherently tied to one another that it’s impossible to determine cause and effect, although they do seem (at least on the surface) incredibly related.Read the article

8 Bad Mistakes That Make Good Employees Leave

It’s tough to hold on to good employees, but it shouldn’t be. Most of the mistakes that companies make are easily avoided. When you do make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most options. If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees. While this should be common sense, it isn’t common enough. A survey by CEB found that one-third of star employees feel disengaged from their employer and are already looking for a new job. When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler, who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it as brownout. Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs.Read the article

Google Jamboard: a surprisingly fun 4K ‘whiteboard’

Google’s Jamboard is a 4K, internet-connected whiteboard that can sync across dozens of other computer, tablet, and whiteboard screens. We stopped by Google’s New York office to check it out.Read the article

Why You Need Two Types of Content Strategist

Recently I was asked: “How do you define an exceptional content experience?” My response was “I don’t deal with front-end experience. I make the content sing and dance by managing it behind the scenes. A front-end strategist tells me what’s needed, and I develop the back-end strategy to support those needs.” Content strategists come in two main types: front-end and back-end. If you’re a marketer who treats your organization’s content as a business asset, you need to understand both types of strategist so you can bring in the right kind of help at the right time or develop the appropriate skills in-house.Read the article

THESE 5 MAJOR UI MISTAKES WILL KILL YOUR APP

There’s no one universal formula for a great UI app design (if you know one, please let us know). But we do know some major mistakes to avoid if you want to deliver a great app. We’ve seen every one of these mistakes made by designers of all levels of experience. There’s no shame in that—a good UI design is a multifaceted challenge, and many aspects can be simply overlooked. At All In Mobile, we often redesign apps for clients who are not satisfied with their product and want to improve the way their app looks and feels. That’s why today we want to share some major no-nos we’ve gathered. Of course, we’re about fixing solutions, not just pointing them out. That’s why we’ll also show you a redesigned app view list, demonstrating all 5 of these major UI mistakes—and how your team can fix them.Read the article

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week: Presentations at Uber: The Gift of Giving...

Stephen GatesJuly 14, 2017

Creative Director, Designer, Brand Builder, Speaker, Podcaster, Crazy One.
As a designer, I have 20+ years experience creating the strategy, concepts, and designs for award-winning integrated global advertising campaigns, building multiple global Fortune 500 brands and creating innovative digital experiences. As a leader, I have 15+ years transforming agency and client-side teams using a mix of creativity, business strategy, process and political skill to create innovative, world-class work and cultures that change industries and companies. My clients have included American Airlines, W Hotels, Disney, Citi, ExxonMobil, Acura, Old Navy, Nationwide Insurance, Verizon, Subaru and many others. My work has received over 150 international awards, my app designs have been named as one of the World’s 100 Greatest Apps, Apple has featured my work in 9 keynotes, 4 TV commercials and more.